


marks of bravery

by YubiShines



Category: Mass Effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 13:29:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YubiShines/pseuds/YubiShines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In response to the conclusion of UNC: Dead Scientists. Exploring the backstory of a Colonist/Survivor. Original posting: 9 Mar 2012.</p>
            </blockquote>





	marks of bravery

_Don't tell me who I am! You got away with a few scratches and a scary reputation! The rest of the unit died, and I was tortured for years, Shepard! You can't judge me. You don't have the right._

\---

Funny thing is, it's true. Mostly.

The rep, yeah, definitely. It's useful. It's annoying. It's the source of a couple jokes back in the day that working with Shepard was a suicide assignment, ha ha. It's how you came to be on the ship in the first place, though the captain hadn't said it in so many words, not to you, anyway. It's a license for everyone to pat you solicitously on the arm and say _oh I can't imagine what you must have gone through it must have been awful_. It's disquieting, looking at people's eyes and seeing someone you don't recognize reflected in them. Some other commander, someone noble and tormented and stoically-driven.

 _Please_ , you want to say. _Spare me_.

You don't dream about it, even before you hauled Alenko off the beacon and got your fool self pulled in instead, and now every time you close your eyes it's those red-washed images over and over, like it wasn't enough the first time, thanks. You could ask the doctor for a little something to help, but Christ, the _last_ thing you need right now is drugs potentially blurring your mind. Your practical mind says the visions are a clue and any day now you'll figure out what they mean; your superstitious side mutters that it's a prophecy and only an idiot ignores those.

They tell you that a new colony has been established on Akuze and it's doing well. Good for them.

Scars, though.

On your side and your lower back, there's a broad mark like a flare, chemical burns courtesy of the threshers. (It strikes you as somewhat unfair: not _only_ are the fucking things hundreds of feet long and tentacled and stupid fast with a propensity to tunnel up right under your nose, they can spit acid as well?) But aside from your doctors and certain people of past acquaintance, no one has seen those. Not unless there are photos circulating the net that you don't know about, anyway.

Frankly, there aren't a whole lot of marines with major scar tissue these days, medical gel solves that if infection hasn't set in deep, but old action-movie assumptions are what they are. And isn't it a sight, the commander with the dashing jagged line over her eye! Look at that, it says. Think of what that soldier has been through.

You didn't get that one from Akuze.

When you do dream about the past, you dream about running. You dream about smoke, and burning animals, and firelight glinting off too many eyes.

You tripped over your own feet, you remember, like the first dumb kid to die in an old horror vid, but it wasn't a film and it wasn't a loony with a chainsaw at your heels, it was you, you and your home, your home invaded by slavers with their guns and their knives, you knocking your head on a wall and the blood trickling down your forehead to mix with the dust and _Oh fuck me I'm blind_ scrambling to your feet again to run and run and run.

They didn't find you.

Your scars are not marks of bravery. Neither are they of cowardice. They are your history written on your skin for the world to see, and people don't even get that history right. There's black humor for you.

The best advice you ever had was when the patrol picked you up, filthy and half-feral like a stray cat, and they brought you back to their camp and you snarled at the sergeant that you should be dead. _Don't think about it like that_ , the sergeant said. _The people down there should be alive and free. That's how it should be._

You thought about those words when you enlisted, and you thought about them five years later when you landed up in a field hospital getting treated for acid burns, a hero for no better reason than being the only one left.

This is the third thing you got out of Akuze that no one knows about, that has nothing to do with your reputation or your skin, the third wish that turns the first two on their head: The knowledge that you would do anything, break every rule and push every limit, before you saw someone die on your watch. Not again. Never again.

And if the universe has anything to say about that, then, well, it can just fuck right off.


End file.
